The next meeting of Environment Ministers is coming up in September 2026, and what is becoming increasingly evident is that around the world, governments are steadily repositioning waste and resource recovery as an essential part of industrial policy, economic resilience and sovereign capability, while Australia, meanwhile, continues to go in circles.
We commission reviews. We announce targets. We establish working groups. We fund another trial. Yet we repeatedly avoid the system-wide reforms needed to build viable markets for recovered materials and give industry the confidence to invest.
The contrast with developments overseas is becoming increasingly stark.
Europe is moving from circular-economy ambition to enforceable market rules. Its Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation is now being implemented, with requirements covering packaging minimisation, recyclability, recycled content, reuse and producer responsibility.
The underlying principle is simple: the costs of managing packaging already exist. The question is whether those costs continue to fall disproportionately on communities, councils and the resource-recovery industry — or are fairly allocated to the producers placing packaging onto the market, consistent with the polluter-pays principle?
Europe is also progressing stricter rules for end-of-life vehicles, product repairability, batteries and ecodesign. Its proposed Circular Economy Act is intended to establish a functioning single market for secondary raw materials and stimulate demand for recycled feedstock.
Critically, Europe has recognised something Australia continues to overlook: collecting and processing material is not enough. Circularity requires markets.
That means governments must address both sides of the equation.
Supply-side measures such as collection targets, infrastructure funding and processing capacity must be matched by demand-side measures including mandatory recycled content, sustainable procurement, consistent product standards and reliable long-term offtake.
Without those settings, Australia can collect more material while simultaneously undermining the businesses expected to recover it.
Waste exports are also becoming more difficult. From November 2026, the European Union will prohibit plastic-waste exports to non-OECD countries. Exporters will face stronger traceability, consent and overseas-facility auditing requirements. This is likely to increase pressure for domestic processing capacity and reinforce an important principle: developed economies must take responsibility for the materials they consume.
But let's remember as an industry, we would prefer not to export, rather keep these materials, their value and the jobs at home!
At the global level, plastics-treaty negotiations remain difficult. Countries are still divided over whether the agreement should address the full lifecycle of plastics — including production, problematic products and chemicals — or focus primarily on downstream waste management.
But even this debate demonstrates how far the international conversation has advanced. The question is no longer simply how to collect more plastic. It is how products are designed, who pays for their impacts, how unnecessary material use is avoided and how value is retained across the entire lifecycle.
The economic case is also becoming impossible to ignore. The Circularity Gap Report 2026 estimates that linear material use results in approximately €25.4 trillion in avoidable economic value being lost each year — nearly 31 per cent of global GDP.
Circularity is therefore not simply about recycling more. It is about preventing valuable materials, energy, infrastructure and productive capacity from being unnecessarily destroyed.
Other nations are also treating end-of-life batteries, solar panels, electronics and vehicles as sources of critical minerals and strategic commodities. Resource-recovery infrastructure is increasingly understood as sovereign industrial infrastructure — not an inconvenient land use to be pushed to the urban fringe without appropriate planning protection.
Australia should be exceptionally well positioned to lead this transition. We have abundant critical minerals, have industry capability, technical expertise, valuable material streams and significant demand for infrastructure and manufactured products.
What we lack is a coherent system.
Australia needs:
• a nationally consistent circular-economy framework with clear priorities, funded actions and accountabilities;
• properly designed, mandatory product-stewardship schemes that fairly allocate existing end-of-life costs to producers- ideally in the form of a national waste directives framework so we don't always have to go product by product;
• recycled-content requirements and sustainable-procurement policies that create demand for recovered materials; and
• long-term policy certainty capable of unlocking private investment.
Grants and pilot projects have a role, but they cannot compensate for broken market settings.
Industry cannot invest with confidence when procurement commitments are optional, recovered materials compete against artificially cheap virgin inputs and responsibility for products disappears once they are sold.
The rest of the world is increasingly treating circularity as an economic and industrial necessity.
Australia must stop treating it as a collection of isolated waste initiatives.
We do not need another lap around the same policy circuit. We need the political resolve to make the system fixes that industry has consistently called for — and that a genuine circular economy requires.
Ministers — we are watching.
Gayle Sloane is CEO of The Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association of Australia (WMRR).
WMRR is the only national peak body for the $15bn waste and resource recovery industry. Its membership covers the entire spectrum of the industry including landfill, recycling and resource recovery, energy from waste, e-waste, organics, construction and demolition, commercial and industrial, hazardous and biohazardous waste sectors.
